Culture

Benjamin Domenech and Robert Tracinski have an intriguing article up at The Federalist in which they opine the left in general, and Social Justice Warriors in particular, are setting up a huge cultural backlash by their triumphalism and overreach following the SCOTUS finding in favor of gay marriage. They site the “iron law of the cultures wars” as their premise.

The iron law of the culture wars is that the public hates overreach—and each side will always overreach.

Domenech and Tracinski take us through the history of our recent culture wars. 1.0 was the ’60s and 70’s “counterculture”.

[C]onsisted of a combination of two things: a promise of “liberation” from restrictions that seemed overly Puritanical and outmoded, combined with an ideological goal of the destruction of existing social institutions such as church, family, and capitalism.

The first aim had a broad appeal, promising freedom from blue-nosed moral scolds and a liberating revolution in human behavior. But the second was a more aggressive and provocative attack on institutions that had endured since before the country existed. By the late 1970s, the effects of the Counterculture were hitting with full force, and people didn’t like what they saw.

Which led to the backlash of 2.0. The birth of the “Religious Right” which became the “Moral Majority” and a move back toward more traditional values.

Political wives started a crusade against violent and sexually explicit television, movies, and popular music.

The desire to “ban” what isn’t “acceptable” by the culture driving the train at the moment seems overwhelming, regardless of the side.

On to 3.0 which is a bit more complex. Clinton was impeached, which much of the country saw as overreach (it was none of the business of politicians, they figured), especially in light of those condemning him (remember Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers?). But again, what it primarily did was put the “counterculture” kids back on the offensive and the more traditional side, guilty of the overreach, on the defensive again:

The Counterculture kids from the 1960s and 70s were now ensconced in positions of power. They had taken over the universities in the 1990s and began to assert a campus culture of conformity on issues involving religion and sex. They had established themselves as the leaders in entertainment and popular culture. The nostalgic and implicitly conservative pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s, where villains were Nazis, Communists, feckless bureaucrats, and irresponsible reporters—gave way to influential depictions designed to press a change in social norms. 1998 brought Bill Clinton’s impeachment, but it also brought “Will & Grace” and a push for greater tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality. The crusade for gay marriage—a key change in goals for the gay-rights movement—threw religious conservatives into a defensive posture, causing them to fight to maintain their mores as public policy via gay-marriage bans.

Boom – here we are, and we’ve entered 4.0 and the beginnings of overreach by the left:

Today we live in the early stages of that triumph, and as a small number of public intellectuals and media commentators predicted, it is a bloody triumph indeed. Culture War 4.0 brings the Counterculture full circle: now they have become the blue-nosed, Puritanical establishment. Once they began to achieve their goals and saw the culture moving their way, they moved from making a plea for tolerance and freedom to demanding persecution of anyone who dissents against the new orthodoxy in even the smallest way.

Whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and alienating the public.

In just the past two years, the Counterculture’s neo-Puritanical reign has made things political that were never thought to be: Shirtstorms and Gamergate, Chik-fil-A and Brandon Eich, Indiana and Sad Puppies, and don’t you dare say Caitlyn Jenner isn’t a hero.

Instead of being content and modest in their victory for gay rights, the left has chosen instead to be aggressive and intolerant. Overreach begins:

Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage—the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists—some were already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs. We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides, and the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would no longer support bipartisan religious-freedom measures it once backed wholeheartedly. A reality TV star pushed the transgender rights movement into the center of the national dialogue even as Barack Obama’s administration used its interpretation of Title IX to push its genderless bathroom policies into public schools. And we learned that pulling Confederate merchandise off the shelves isn’t enough to mitigate the racism of the past—we must bring down statues and street signs, too, destroying reminders of history now deemed inconvenient and unsafe.

On college campuses and in the workplace, across mass media and social media, for American celebrities and private citizens, every comment, act, or joke can make you the next target for a ritual of daily attack by outraged Twitter mobs. It is now an unavoidable fact of life that giving money to the wrong cause, making a “clumsy attempt at humor,” or taking the wrong side on a celebrity, religious debate, or magazine cover can lead to threats of violent death, end your career in an instant, or make you the most hated person in America for 15 minutes—longer if you bungle the apology.

American society is, for the most part, an incredibly tolerant society. However, there is a point beyond which it won’t be pushed. It reacts, sometimes subtly and sometimes more forcefully. It is that innate tolerance that drives this reaction. Tolerance cannot abide the intolerance of those who would impose their cultural values on others by force – i.e. the force of law, bans, infringement on rights, etc. There are lines drawn by society at large and it doesn’t care what side the culture warriors are on, it refuses to let them cross those lines.

We’re again seeing a coalition forming in opposition to the current “victors” of the culture wars, interestingly including many on the left. We’re also beginning to see the SJWs and their like begin to “eat their own” as their rigid orthodoxy is applied to their own kind. It was inevitable and it is somewhat humorous to watch. But the bottom line is they’ve overreached and are now beginning to reap the backlash they have sown.

Frankly, that is long overdue. As Domenech and Traciski conclude:

This is the hopeful side of the culture wars—a call for engagement, not retreat. Religious believers weighing the option of withdrawing from a culture increasingly hostile to their values should redouble their efforts to cultivate their ideas within active subcultures that influence the nation and the next generation of Americans. Those who share a commitment to the freedom to think, speak, associate, publish, and express their beliefs may not have the American Civil Liberties Union in our corner any more—but that just means that we get to take up the noble cause, and the moral authority, they have abandoned.

Yes, this can be a dangerous time to be active in the culture. But it’s very hard to make speech codes, safe spaces, and other anti-thoughtcrime measures work in the long term. Sometimes all it takes for the whole apparatus to come crashing down is a handful of people brave enough to speak their minds without fear.

Victor Davis Hanson makes the point that what once began as an exceptional experiment in unity and was often dubbed “a melting pot”, has now become a grouping of humorless and easily offended factions always trying to claim the mantle of victimhood:

In the last half-century, Americans have increasingly tended to emphasize race and tribe in promoting “diversity,” rather than seeking to strengthen the more tenuous notion of unity with their fellow citizens. We have forgotten that human nature is fond of division and must work at setting aside superficial tribal affinities to unite on the basis of core values and ideas. Symbols, flags, organizations, and phrases that emphasize racial difference and ethnic pride are no longer just fossilized notions from the 1960s; they are growing fissures in the American mosaic that now threaten to split the country apart — fueling the suspicion of less liberal and more homogeneous nations that the great American experiment will finally unwind as expected.

Symbols, flags, organizations, and phrases that emphasize racial difference and ethnic pride are no longer just fossilized notions from the 1960s; they are growing fissures in the American mosaic that now threaten to split the country apart — fueling the suspicion of less liberal and more homogeneous nations that the great American experiment will finally unwind as expected.

So the answer? Dump all the symbols and organizations that divide. Drop the race exclusive organizations like La Raza and the Congressional Black Caucus. Either that or keep your mouth shut when someone starts the National Association of White People.

You can’t have it both ways. And remember something that is indeed unique about this land:

In an America that was originally founded by mostly Northern European immigrants, a Juan Lopez from Oaxaca is freely accepted as a U.S. citizen in a way that a white Bob Jones would never fully be embraced as a citizen of Mexico, a country whose constitution still expressly sets out racially chauvinistic guidelines that govern immigration law. Someone who appears African or European would have a hard time fully integrating as a citizen in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese society, in a way not true of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in America. The world assumes that in America a president, attorney general, secretary of state, or Supreme Court justice can be black; but it would be as surprised to find whites as high public officials in Zimbabwe as to find a black as prime minister or foreign minister in Sweden or Germany.

We are Americans and we come from all sorts of places and backgrounds, but when we come here we do indeed assimilate into the dominant culture?

Why? Because it is that culture (which, by the way, is borrowed from some of the best of many different cultures) that has made this country both exceptional and great. It’s is the “go to” place for those looking for a better life. Our illegal immigration problem points to that.

But if the left has its way, we’ll all hyphenate our “american” identity, claim victim status and work to divide the polity into bickering hate groups who find everyone else (to include those back through the centuries) at fault for their status.

Were there wrongs committed in history against various races and ethnic groups? Of course there were. But we don’t live in that era. What counts is where we are today. If those wrongs no longer exist then any progressive worth their salt should be claiming … progress. If you’re as old as I am, you don’t have to claim it – you’ve seen it up close and personal. But instead of touting the progress, progressives are the ones leading the charge to divide and weaken. To make us all “victims”.

Quite being victims. Victimhood is a choice. Grow a backbone and say no to the negativity of that nonsense. Drop the symbols and groups that emphasize race and/or victimhood. Become Americans. Work together.

Not everything is about race in this country. But when it is about race, then it just is. So when a guy who has been depicted wearing a jacket featuring an apartheid-era Rhodesian flag allegedly walks into a historic black church and guns down nine African-American worshipers at a Bible study meeting, common sense leads one to believe his motivations are based in racism. When the sole adult survivor of the ordeal reports that the killer shouted before opening fire, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go” — well, that sounds to me a lot like racial hatred.

Let’s call this sickness what it is, so we can get on with the healing. If this were a medical disease, and all the doctors recognized the symptoms but refused to make the diagnosis for fear of offending the patient, we could call it madness. But there are people who are claiming that they can lead this country who dare not call this tragedy an act of racism, a hate crime, for fear of offending a particular segment of the electorate.

It is and was an act of racism. Anyone with a tepid IQ should know that and why anyone would deny it is beyond me. Racism is not dead in this country. Plenty of racists still exist. But here’s a news flash … they’re not just confined to the white race.

That said, Carson is right. Face what it is, call it what it is and then deal with the aftermath. The fact that this yahoo was a racist, however, doesn’t allow anyone the broad brush they’d like to have and we’ve seen waved about in the wake of this tragedy.

Oh, and by the way, the citizens of Charleston, much better than our leadership (political, cultural and opinion leaders included) have shown the world how a town handles such a crime. They know it was an act of racism. They also know that not everyone is racist. And they’re uniting not dividing. The families have forgiven the slug who killed their loved ones – something I’d likely have difficulty doing. But when all is said and done, the citizens of Charleston are acting like the adults in this tragedy. Too bad our president hasn’t acted that way.

That’s what Paul McHugh, the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School does with the notion of “transgenderism”. McHugh has spent 40 years, 26 as Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital, “studying people who claim to be transgender. ”

The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.

Or said another way, he doesn’t buy the present day “meme” at all. He finds it destructive. And the meme is all based in “feelings” rather than science:

The champions of this meme, encouraged by their alliance with the broader LGBT movement, claim that whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is more of a disposition or feeling about yourself than a fact of nature. And, much like any other feeling, it can change at any time, and for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, no one could predict who would swap this fact of their makeup, nor could one justifiably criticize such a decision.

At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of “transgendered” among young and old.

A little, “been there, done that, it doesn’t hold up”. That will royally piss off the SJWs who’ve this infantile belief that if you “feel” something, it must be true. But as we’ve seen and discussed, that meme has taken hold, regardless of its lack of scientific foundation or, frankly, reality:

But the meme—that your sex is a feeling, not a biological fact, and can change at any time—marches on through our society. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In that tale, the Emperor, believing that he wore an outfit of special beauty imperceptible to the rude or uncultured, paraded naked through his town to the huzzahs of courtiers and citizens anxious about their reputations. Many onlookers to the contemporary transgender parade, knowing that a disfavored opinion is worse than bad taste today, similarly fear to identify it as a misapprehension.

I am ever trying to be the boy among the bystanders who points to what’s real. I do so not only because truth matters, but also because overlooked amid the hoopla—enhanced now by Bruce Jenner’s celebrity and Annie Leibovitz’s photography—stand many victims. Think, for example, of the parents whom no one—not doctors, schools, nor even churches—will help to rescue their children from these strange notions of being transgendered and the problematic lives these notions herald. These youngsters now far outnumber the Bruce Jenner type of transgender. Although they may be encouraged by his public reception, these children generally come to their ideas about their sex not through erotic interests but through a variety of youthful psychosocial conflicts and concerns.

Yes, he said it … many go along out of “fear” of having a “disfavored opinion”. Luckily, I’m not one of those – nor, apparently is Dr. McHugh. And to those of us without such fear, this emperor has had no clothes for quite some time. Where does all of this delusional empathy produce?

First, though, let us address the basic assumption of the contemporary parade: the idea that exchange of one’s sex is possible. It, like the storied Emperor, is starkly, nakedly false. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future.

When “the tumult and shouting dies,” it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.

There is nothing “scientific” about the assumptions of the meme, in fact, they’re blatantly anti-science. And indulging them can lead to catastrophic results, such as the suicide rates suffered by those who undergo such sex-reassignment surgery.

Most young boys and girls who come seeking sex-reassignment are utterly different from Jenner. They have no erotic interest driving their quest. Rather, they come with psychosocial issues—conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex—and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.

The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only “gender counselors” who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.

Treatment. Psychiatric treatment and counseling. Or to say the words that a certain community and its activists will loathe – it’s not a choice, it’s a disorder.

Bottom line:

What is needed now is public clamor for coherent science—biological and therapeutic science—examining the real effects of these efforts to “support” transgendering. Although much is made of a rare “intersex” individual, no evidence supports the claim that people such as Bruce Jenner have a biological source for their transgender assumptions. Plenty of evidence demonstrates that with him and most others, transgendering is a psychological rather than a biological matter.

In fact, gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.

Interesting. Sure to make waves … or it should.

Most likely, it will be dismissed as some sort of “right wing” conspiracy to deny choice. Oh, and McHugh is also likely to attacked … for speaking out about something he’s spent a lifetime studying.

But such is the fate of those who fight the ‘meme’. Good thing he didn’t tell a bad joke about women or have a recent photo in a “sexist” shirt floating around the internet – he’d have the fems on him too.

After a senseless tragedy that anyone can see was racially motivated and has pretty much received universal condemnation for both the crime and the motivation, you merely have to wait a mere matter of hours before the first of the exploiters attempts to politicize it.

And, of course, there are a plethora of them, I just happened to pick some creature named Chauncey Devega writing in, unsurprisingly, “Salon.” It is entitled “Charleston church massacre: The violence white America must answer for”, because this tragedy is something for which all us white devils must answer. In fact, Chauncey has a list of questions to answer:

They include:

1. What is radicalizing white men to commit such acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings? Are Fox News and the right-wing media encouraging violence?

2. Is something wrong with the white family? Why are their sons and men so violent?

3. What should law enforcement and white politicians do about white crime?

4. Is the Charleston mass shooting just one more sign that America needs sensible and reasonable gun control policies?

5. Where are the white fathers in the white home?

6. When will white leadership step up and stop white right-wing domestic terrorism?

7. Is White American culture pathological? Why is White America so violent?

8. Are there appropriate role models for white men and boys? Could better role models and mentoring help to prevent white men and boys from committing mass shootings and being seduced by right-wing domestic terrorism?

Now if you’ve ever wondered what “tarring with a broad brush” means, here it is. It couldn’t possibly be because the POS that did this shooting is an outlier. No, of course not – its about all those white devils out there all wanting to kill black folks. Don’t you know, there’s “something wrong with the white family”. It’s because their “sons and men are so violent”.

No mention, of course, of the biggest blight on the black community in terms of murder – black on black crime. I’m sure in some way, Chauncey blames that on whitey too.

You have to really chuckle at the “where are white fathers in the white home”. The question of fathers is continually brought up and dismissed when talking about black on black crime.

An amazingly silly list designed to inflame and blame with this following:

Once and again, white privilege is the power to be the ultimate individual where one’s actions and behavior rarely if ever reflects on the collective character of white people en masse. By comparison, Black and brown Americans, Muslims, Arabs and the Other more generally are routinely subjected to group punishment and demonization.

I can say for one that this disgusting excuse for a human being that killed those innocent victims in the Charleston church does not at all reflect on my character nor the character of most whites I know. But then, neither does Chauncey Devega represent most blacks I know either. They, like me, want to stop violence like this from happening to anyone for any reason. They know hate lives in some – on both sides of the color line. But they’re also bright enough to know that condemning whole races for the acts of an aberrant few is both futile and inflammatory. And “inflammatory” is not a way to begin any discussion or actions aimed at solutions.

But hey, when demonizing and politicizing, broad statements of collective guilt are to be expected from those more interested in condemnation and blame than solutions.

In a press briefing early Thursday afternoon, Obama said the massacre should spark national introspection about the availability of guns. That it took place in a black church also “raises questions about a dark part of history, he said.

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” Obama said. “Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. Once again, innocent people were killed because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.

Way to be a leader sir, and pull the people of the nation together in the wake of this tragic event.

And, of course, this bit of pop-psychology comes from none other than The New Republic:

Ultimately, Rachel Dolezal’s story seems like a story about fear. It expresses the fear all white Americans have, or should have: fear of acknowledging our own cultural history as creators of trauma and inflictors of abuse; fear of acknowledging the guilt inherent in this narrative, and, even more staggeringly, taking on the task of alchemizing guilt into something useful. Dolezal’s story also expresses, in its most redemptive moments, the love and respect she truly seemed to have for African-American culture—and the weakness that allowed her to see it not as a culture she wanted to use her white privilege to advocate for, but as a shelter in which she could hide from herself.

This is gob-smackingly stupid and wrong-headed. My cultural history has nothing in it that has me cast as a creator or inflictor of trauma and abuse. So I don’t fear anything of the sort. And I certainly don’t accept anyone trying to invent a history that does. However, the history of my larger culture is fraught with it … but here’s a newsflash, so is the history of every other “culture” – many more than mine! I had nothing to do with that. The culture in which I abide today is one which, for the most part, cherishes truth and shuns a fraud, seeks peace and harmony and asks to be left alone to live their lives without government interference or the interference of SJWs. I am and always have been for equal opportunity for everyone. I treat all people as equals to me. So don’t try to heap on my head the abuses of the past. It is the practice of con-artists, like Al Sharpton – lay the old guilt trip which, once established, allows the con to leverage advantages for themselves. We’re smarter than that – no sale!

As for Dolezal, in simple words, she is a consummate fraud. A con. My culture doesn’t celebrate frauds or cons. It shuns and shames them. It also doesn’t try to explain away their criminality or immorality by trying to place the blame on others. It points at and criticizes the perpetrators of fraud!

And this:

Who are we allowed to become? Children growing up today are likely to believe they can be anyone they want to be, and parents and teachers have grown fond of the phrase “Whatever you are, be a good one.” The emerging narratives of transgender children dovetail perfectly with this philosophy, children whose parents do not force them into a lockstep performance of the gender they were assigned at birth have become visible members of society. Yet the increased presence of transgender issues in our national conversation has prompted some to wonder—with or without their tongue in cheek, or in check—whether this is merely a sign of the times, a side effect of the chaos of modern life. If you can be born male and “become” female, some argue, then can’t you become anything else you want? And if you can be transgender, then can’t the label “transracial” apply, just as legitimately, to someone like Rachel Dolezal?

Who are we allowed to “become”?! We can “become” anyone we want within reason when it comes to making something of ourselves.

That some have decided to “become” something other than they are in terms of gender or race may impress the fools and other wannabes in our society, but it doesn’t at all impress anyone who can reason and understands how reality works. You can “claim” to be a walrus, I imagine you can even “become” one with enough makeup, big tusks and a body suit.

But here’s a news flash – you’re not a freaking walrus. You are still a wannabe. The only difference between you and Dolezal is the level of fraud she perpetrated on others. She was malicious in her fraud, a walrus wannabe would just be a bit sad.

“Nihilism denies that there are any objective grounds for truth, especially regarding morality.” – Tom Lindsey

And Nihilism’s child is post-modernism.

Lindsey is talking about the recent outcry among liberal professors concerning the stifling of speech on campus due to … feelings. Lindsey continues:

True enough. But I wonder whether Schlosser or Kipnis, or most of academe, understand fully the depths of the Academy’s complicity in the atrocities they cite. Take for example, my own field, political science, which, like all the modern social sciences, is grounded in a radical distinction between “facts” and “values, “ according to which, facts alone are knowable, because “empirically verifiable” (provable using only the five senses). Values, in this account, are subjective preferences regarding facts. Hence, for social science, the terms “right,” “wrong,” “just, and “unjust” are unknowable by reason or science.

And there’s the rub: Neither the academic freedom for which Schlosser and Kipnis rightly plea nor political freedom can be defended authoritatively on the basis of the moral-cultural relativism (often termed, “postmodernism”) taught today in the social sciences and the humanities. Why?

If all “values” (moral principles) are equal due to being equally unprovable through reason, then the embrace in the West of values such as political liberty, tolerance, equality, and the rule of law are demoted to mere “subjective preferences,” which are no better or worse than their opposites—slavery, intolerance, inequality, and tyranny. But while the postmodern Academy asserts reason’s impotence at answering life’s deepest questions, it simultaneously denies that we are capable of the “moral neutrality” that seems to follow from relativism. Simply put, they teach that we have no rational basis to make “value judgements,” but neither can we avoid making them.

And that’s what we face today. As “Schlosser” said, “a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice” has produced “higher ed’s current climate of fear,” enforced through a “heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity.”

We’ve heard about the application in academia and how, now, some liberal professors are pushing back. But it isn’t just academia which is infected with this nonsense. Society at large is also becoming more and more infected with it – likely the product of the left’s constant pursuit of Nihilism since the ’60s at least. How many times have you been told that we are not “fit to judge” another’s culture or choices? How dare we assert “right” and “wrong”. It’s all relative. And thus everything is acceptable.

Except when it isn’t.

Take the case of Rachel Dolezel. The most significant “judgement” I’ve seen of her deceitful life is to be found in, of all publications, in Salon.

So this isn’t about being an ally, or making the family of your choosing, or even how one feels on the inside. It’s about, apparently, flat out deception. It’s about how one person chose to obtain a college education and jobs and credibility in her community. It about allegedly pretending to speak from a racial experience you simply don’t have. You want to live your truth, that’s not how you go about it. And it’s an insult to anyone honestly trying to do just that to suggest anything otherwise, for even a moment.

Even this denouncement is careful though. Note the qualifier – “You want to live your truth, that’s not how you go about it.”

Anyone know what that’s about? That’s about carving out an exception to the basic rule of the left that you can indeed make up your own “truth” if you go about it an acceptable way. I’m not sure who gets to judge what is “acceptable” in the world of non-judgement, but there you go.

Rachel Dolezal is a fraud and a fake. It really doesn’t make any difference what her intent was given she has lied and defrauded her way to her present position … or former position given she resigned from the NAACP. She is what she is – white bread as white bread can be. Even her art is a fraud.

So how did someone so fraudulent rise to the level she did?

Well, it’s the wages of being “non-judgemental”. Naively accepting. In this world, you just accept on its face the claims of someone like Dolezal. You let them invent their “victimhood” and revel in it. “Authenticity” is more important than the truth even if the authenticity is counterfeit. A good and useful story is much more important than facts.

It’s about “need” – on both sides. The “need” of Rachel Dolezal to be someone other than she is. And the “need” of those who are “authentically” black to have a “victim” to point too and say, “See! Racism”. She claims to have been the victim of “8 documented hate crimes”. How perfectly lovely. The fact that they pretty much all were found to be baseless isn’t important.

Why was she allowed to go on without questioning? Because she was politically useful. Because she represented a narrative that many want to perpetuate.

And, as with most liars who have told the story so often they begin to believe it, she’s now rationalizing her actions and denying a problem. Her rationalization “I’ve always identified as black” somehow justifies her deceit and she believes her declaration is all that is necessary to provide “truth” to the matter. To her it justifies all her actions, her lies and her misrepresentations. What’s awful and hilarious at the same time is she has allies in this endeavor.

The “deny reality” brigade have so programmed some that they believe that whatever you “believe” to be true is true, even if the reality that everyone else deals in daily says you’re full of beans.

And thus we’re at the point, now being discovered in academia by the left, where “feelings” rule over “reality”.

Lindsey provides us with a quote in closing (remember that he’s talking academia primarily);

“I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?”

Who is he quoting? Well someone Dolezal claimed we who wouldn’t “understand” about race should read – W.E.B. Dubose.

I wonder what he’d think of her sham life or the moral relativity she and others champion.

The quote says, at least to me, that he wouldn’t be too friendly to the idea.

Which brings me to President Obama. While I’m not calling him a genius, I do think he’s extremely intelligent. I also believe that his tendency to use “big picture” thinking while drafting policy is something most Republican voters simply can’t understand.

Now understand it this comes from orthodoxy central, aka a site called “Forward Progressives”. And this is apparently considered “forward thinking”. We just are too stupid to get it.

He uses Obamacare as an example of us not getting it:

While many Republicans want to look at the “now” aspect of the Affordable Care Act, they seem unable to grasp the reality that as more Americans get health insurance, giving them access to preventable care, this lowers expenses down the road for everyone. If people can prevent very costly heart attacks, strokes or other debilitating health issues now, that’s an overall savings for practically everyone from consumers to health insurers to doctors who now have more patients. Quite literally, improving the overall health of Americans will improve the health of this country. It even makes sense for our economy. If workers are healthier, because they have access to quality health care, that means there will be fewer people calling in sick to work, showing up sick to work (putting other employees at risk) or relying on government programs because their health conditions (that were preventable) render them unable to work at all.

But to see all of that requires “big picture” thinking and Republicans seem unable to understand anything beyond the spoon-fed bumper sticker talking points they’re given by the GOP and the conservative media.

We could spend 5,000 words and countless hours expounding on how clueless this is. Health care doesn’t get less expensive if you “subsidize” it by penalizing those who work and earn by making them pay for those who don’t. Period. Wealth is something earned by individuals, not governments. When government’s take other’s wealth to pay for government priorities, it leaves less for the individual who earned it to spend on their priorities. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp, but seems beyond Mr. Clifton and our brilliant president. While all the pie in the sky BS about a healthier American work force sounds wonderful, for the most part it isn’t the workforce that’s benefiting from this subsidy. So while you may want to see this as a “far reaching” plus, it isn’t. There are certainly ways to approach the lack of insurance, but this isn’t one of them.

Mr. Clifton then doubles down on his ignorance of economies with this “Underpants Gnomes” paragraph:

Minimum wage is another issue you see this with. Republicans constantly paint it as a “job killer” (it’s not) while also rallying against the millions of people who are on government assistance. Funny thing though, a good portion of the Americans who are on government assistance have jobs. If we made sure that no American working full-time had to rely on government programs just to survive, instantly we would save our country hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. Not only that, but when Americans have more money, they have more to spend. And what’s the biggest driver of economic growth? Consumer spending. More consumer spending means higher profits and higher demand, which means – more jobs.

But once again, when it comes to Republicans and explaining job creation, anything outside of “tax cuts create jobs” is often too complex for many of them to understand.

So, where again does the money come from to pay that $15 minimum wage? The earnings of the business. And what will a business have to do if it has to pay that wage? Well it has some choices – raise prices, lay off workers, go out of business, etc.

Would someone have more money to spend? Yes, if they weren’t laid off or their business didn’t close their doors.

And how big of a jump in spending money would they have? Well initially a bit. But then prices would adjust, because, you see, as the price of labor goes up, so do the prices of commodities and goods. In other words, if they still have a job and they’re earning $15 an hour, fairly quickly prices will catch up with their gain and their purchasing power will be about the same as they previously enjoyed. Meanwhile, businesses who can keep the doors open are raising prices and laying off workers, or considering automation as a replacement for workers.

Apparently this too is beyond the grasp of Mr. Clinton and the brilliant president. Half the story, in both cases, is where Clifton stops. And this is considered just freaking brilliant by the boob.

And you wonder why the left lives in a fantasy world? This isn’t rocket science nor is there a dearth of examples proving these points. They are everywhere, throughout history. Look them up? Oh, hell no … let’s continue to live in our fantasy orthodoxy and call everyone else stupid.

One of the problems associated with the military is the issue of “stolen valor”, i.e. wannabes who claim service, awards and decorations they haven’t done or earned.

No one other than other wannabes defends this because it is so outrageously wrong in every way. They haven’t done the service or haven’t earned the awards and they aren’t who they say they are. And they are shamed and shunned because of their lies.

That seems to be the proper way to handle those sorts of things. If you’re not what you say you are, no amount of wanting changes that. So why should we as a society have to humor that? We don’t in this case. Why do we in other cases? If I paste a horn on my head and claim to be a unicorn, does that make me one? And do you have to accept my desire as “valid” or “true”?

Of course not.

Meet Spokane’s NAACP Chapter President Rachel Dolezal. Ms. Dolezal, as she appears now, claims to have been a “bi-racial” child and having African-American blood. On the right is a picture of a younger Ms. Dolezal as she appeared years earlier when she was naturally blond haired and blue-eyed.

She’s claimed a black father and a black son for some time.

The young man is actually her brother, adopted by her real parents years ago. The man on the right she claims is her dad. He’s not. Here he is with her mom.

Yes, about as “white-bread” a pair of parents as you can get.

Ms. Dolezal has claimed a horrific earlier life to add to her “black” bona-fides. But they are as false as her racial claims:

In an interview with the Coeur d’ Alene Press, Dolezal’s mother shot down many other claims her daughter has made in interviews over the years. Specifically:

Dolezal’s claim she was born in a tepee.

‘Totally false,’ said her mother. She and Dolezal’s father once lived in a tepee but it was before Dolezal was born.

Dolezal’s claim she once had to use bows and arrows to hunt for her own food as a kid.

Not true, says her mother.

Dolezal’s claim she once lived in South Africa.

‘Rachel did not even ever visit us there,’ said Ruthanne, who lived there as a missionary.

Dolezal’s claim her parents punished her ‘by skin complexion’ with a ‘baboon whip’ reminiscent of those once used on slaves.

‘She is fabricating a very false and malicious lie,’ Ruthanne said.

Dolezal’s claim that Larry Dolezal, who is white, is actually her stepfather.

‘Anybody who lives in the town of Troy or Libby knows that Larry is her father,’ Ruthanne said.

So, what should we think of this pretender who has lied and fabricated so much about her life as well as making up horrific stories about her parents?

Well, my inclination is to treat her the same we we treat valor thieves … shame her. And to point out that as much as she wants to be black, claiming she is doesn’t make it so (take note, Bruce Jenner, your chromosomes still say “X” and “Y”, no matter how you dress or what you hack off).

But apparently that’s not how it works in this day and age:

Make up a few “facts” (“10% of all people are born (with the wrong skin color)” – really? And from whence does that little pearl originate?), claim victimhood, and bingo, you’re a “minority” with a “cause” which should be a) tolerated and b) treated as if your fantasy is reality.

Yeah, sorry, not playing this game.

You are what you are – that’s reality. If you can’t deal with it, it’s not my fault or my problem. You’re not a victim. You’re not entitled. You need help.

In a new interview, former Democrat President Jimmy Carter slammed America as a “racist” nation that refuses to let “old wounds” heal.

Carter spoke to the liberal AARP retirement group in an interview that was released late this week. At one point, Carter said that dreams of a color-blind society are still unrealized in the U.S.

“The recent publicity about mistreatment of black people in the judicial and police realm has been a reminder that the dreams of the civil rights movement have not been realized,” Carter said.

Carter continued insisting that “Americans still have racist tendencies or feelings of superiority to people of color.”

Unless he’s speaking for himself, he damn sure isn’t speaking for me. I’m not sure where he gets off with trying to tag all Americans with “racist tendencies” or “feelings of superiority to people of color”. And one must remember the party he’s affiliated with and it’s history in the region of the country from which he hails

Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia graduate famous across the country as “Mattress Girl” after she hauled a mattress around campus for a year to protest the school’s handling of her alleged rape, has apparently released a sex tape recreating her alleged rape.

Like the Rolling Stone “rape” story out of UVa, she is a fraud. Now Sulkowicz inflicts this nasty little piece of work on the internet? Shuffle off to … wherever, lady. You’ve overstayed your welcome and our tolerance.

Lord they must think we’re dumb (“Wizard’s first rule). NOAA has suddenly discovered “adjustments” in temperature data that conveniently wipes out the 15 year hiatus on warming:

To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well. Scientists said adjusted ship-based temperature data “had the largest impact on trends for the 2000-2014 time period, accounting for 0.030°C of the 0.064°C trend difference.” They added that the “buoy offset correction contributed 0.014°C… to the difference, and the additional weight given to the buoys because of their greater accuracy contributed 0.012°C.”

This, my friends, is not science. This is adjusting the data to get the result one wants. And we all know what that is.

The federal government is notifying up to 4 million current and former employees that their personal financial data may have been breached by a hack attack from China, the Obama administration said Thursday.

Credit card data, banking records, and other forms of financial information could have been stolen in the attack, affecting people across the spectrum of the federal government, officials said.

Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing investigation, said hackers working with China are the main suspects.

New testimony reveals that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) used “hundreds of attorneys” to hide critical information from Congress’s investigation of the IRS targeting of conservatives.

According to new congressional bombshell testimony today, the IRS set up a previously unknown “special project team” comprised of “hundreds of attorneys,” including the IRS Chief Counsel (one of only two politically appointed positions at the IRS).

The “special project” this team was given? Concealing information from Congress.

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison, and disclosure division, Mary Howard, testified that soon after the IRS targeting scandal was revealed, the IRS “amassed hundreds of attorneys to go through the documents [requested by Congress] and redact them.”

Our government is becoming more and more of a criminal conspiracy daily.

Why are so many poor people obese? Well, as the SJWs would like you to believe its because of “food deserts”. That is they don’t have access to nutritious food, but are stuck with fast food, etc. A new study says “not so fast”:

As a result, the authors suggest, local policies intended to punish fast-food purveyors, liquor stores, quickie markets and other sellers of high-calorie, low-nutrition food might not be the best way to go.

One thing that can make a difference is education. Low-income households with higher education levels, the authors say, “purchase more healthful foods.” Those with low income and low education “respond very little” to having healthful foods available.

Of course this won’t deter SJWs from trying to limit choice even more, will it. After all, they always know best how you should live your lives.

I have written (here and here) how progressives are masters are distorting words and redefining them so that they no longer are even close to their original meanings. “Liberal” and “gay,” of course, are probably the most such distorted words. Words are the ammunition of discussion and debate, and if one side is allowed to select the ammunition, well, the ensuing discussions and debates are to be expectedly one-sided.

When you’re allowed to redefine words within the narrative, you own the narrative. And when you own the narrative and you’re a progressive, you end up driving the cultural bus off a cliff.